In the Bronx, heroin woes never went away

If the South Bronx were a state it would have the second-highest rate of drug overdose deaths — 34 per 100,000 people — in the country, after West Virginia.

22 Apr 2017

During the 1970s and ’80s, Sojourner McCauley, who grew up in the Melrose Houses in the South Bronx, was known as a “garbage head.” Garbage heads were catholic in their drug tastes, getting high on whatever was around. Until she stopped at the insistence of her children 30 years ago, Ms. McCauley, who is now the coordinator of community services at Boom, a drug-treatment center in Mott Haven, had multiple addictions, she said recently, including a dependence on heroin, whose devastating movement through the Bronx she has observed for decades, never noticing a time it was absent.

If the South Bronx were a state (its population of more than a half-million makes it roughly equivalent to Wyoming’s) it would have the second-highest rate of drug overdose deaths — 34 per 100,000 people — in the country, after West Virginia. The majority of these deaths are due to heroin, which during the past several months has arrived in New York, as it has in many other places around the country, laced with fentanyl, a painkiller typically used to treat late-stage cancer patients, and 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

Most of what is getting here, said Dr. Mary T. Bassett, New York City’s health commissioner, seems to come from China; since July, nearly half of all fatal drug overdoses in the city have involved fentanyl.

The CSTF is a joint initiative of the New York and Vienna NGO Committees on Drugs. To support preparations for the 2019 Ministerial Segment, to be held at the 62nd Session of CND, Global Civil Society Hearings are being held in New York (20th February 2019) and Vienna (26th February 2019).

This event will launch Harm Reduction International's latest report on this issue and discuss how abolishing the death penalty for drug offemnces could serve as an entry point for broader abolition efforts.